by Greil Marcus
The fires of the klieg lights have melted the makeup of the so-called brilliant mime—and exposed the sinister and compromised old man.
Go home, Mister Chaplin.
The Lettrist International:
SERGE BERNA
JEAN-L. BRAU
GUY-ERNEST DEBORD
GIL J WOLMAN
There was an argument here: the notion that Chaplin’s sentimental art, the art of City Lights, any art, was “emotional blackmail”—a diversion of one’s living strength toward an empty heaven, where everything was true and nothing was possible. The argument did not exactly make the papers. Combat identified the anti-Chaplin hooligans as “lettrists”; along with Pomerand and Lemaitre, Isou thus disassociated himself from the action, though in the mildest terms. In a letter to Combat, Isou noted the “excessive hysteria” that had greeted Chaplin, but rested his case with the argument that Chaplin’s creative work in the cinema rendered him inviolate: a god was a god. Isou did not denounce his four disciples; he merely joined in “the homage everyone has rendered to Chaplin.”
Debord and the others were not about to yield their opportunity. For the first time, they occupied the terrain of public life, and they were happy there. From Belgium, where they had gone to screen Isou’s Treatise, they wrote to Combat:
Following our intervention against the press conference held by Chaplin at the Ritz, and the bits and pieces of the tract “No More Flat Feet” reproduced in the newspapers—a tract which, alone, took a stand against this artist—Isou and his submissive, graying followers have published a note disapproving of our actions (in this specific circumstance) in Combat. We have appreciated the significance of Chaplin’s work in its own time—but we know that today novelty lies elsewhere, and that “truths which are no longer interesting turn into lies” (Isou).
The members of the Lettrist International staked out their ground:
We believe that the most urgent expression of freedom is the destruction of idols, especially when they claim to represent freedom. The provocative tone of our leaflet was a reaction against a unanimous and servile enthusiasm. The fact that certain lettrists, and Isou himself, have chosen to disclaim us is proof of the incomprehension which always did, and still does, separate extremists from those who no longer stand close to the edge, and separates us from those who have relinquished “the bitterness of their youth” and “smile” upon established glories—and separates those over twenty from those under thirty. We claim sole responsibility for a text we alone have signed. We ourselves disclaim no one. Indignation leaves us utterly indifferent. To be reactionary is not a matter of degree.
We abandon our detractors to the anonymous crowd of the easily offended.
Ignoring the law mandating a right of reply for disputes aired in the press, no doubt because of the ephemerality of the whole affair once Chaplin took his leave of France, Combat did not publish the statement. The anti-Chaplin “intervention” was swallowed in the publicity of its moment: two days’ gossip in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. At most it was a small-time replay of the Notre-Dame affair, on the trickier terrain of popular culture. It did not have the same effect: neither Marx nor anyone else had ever suggested that the criticism of popular culture was the prerequisite of all criticism. The new members of the Lettrist International swiftly vanished into their own lives, into their own unformed activities, into the obscurity affirmed in Hurlements en faveur de Sade. They did not share Isou’s taste for publicity—and they would not really emerge for almost six years, when the first number of Internationale situationniste appeared across Western Europe. “YOUNG GUYS, YOUNG GIRLS,” read its last page, facing a photo of Brigitte Bardot supine on horseback, raising her breasts into the air,
“Those who no longer stand close to the edge,” 1987
Talent wanted for getting out of this and playing
No special qualifications
Whether you’re beautiful or you’re bright
History could be on your side
WITH THE SITUATIONISTS
No telephone. Write or turn up:
32, rue de la Montagne-Geneviève, Paris, 5e.
LIPSTICK TRACES (ON A CIGARETTE)
Early in 1953 a teenager named Jean-Michel Mension turned himself into a living poster and paraded through the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés with cryptic slogans scrawled up and down his pants. Ed van der Elsken, a young Dutch photographer, stopped the boy and posed him with one Fred, a thug. Today you can just make out the inscriptions: “L’INTERNATIONALE LETTRISTE NE PASSERA PAS” on Mension’s right leg, bits of an advertisement for Hurlements en faveur de Sade on his left (“film dynamique,” and something about “lots of girls”). A few days later, Mension and Fred got drunk, streaked their hair with peroxide, and stumbled through the quarter slapping female shoppers and picking fights with businessmen. They were beaten to the pavement, where the police found them and took them to jail.
About the same time, new graffiti began to appear on the walls of the neighborhood:
LET US LIVE
THE ETHER IS FOR SALE FOR NOTHING
LONG LIVE THE EPHEMERAL
FREE THE PASSIONS
NEVER WORK
New, my eye, anyone on the Left Bank might have said—it was old-time surrealism, and a crude imitation at that. But the crudity was the point. The surrealists had first launched such slogans in the 1920s, when revolution seemed inevitable; in the early 1950s, when revolution seemed impossible, the words were barely language at all. They made an inversion. The poor phrases were so primitively surrealist they were pre-surrealist. They said that surrealism had never happened, that everything remained to be invented from the beginning. “All those who attempt to situate themselves after surrealism,” read the first article in the first number of Internationale situationniste, June 1958, “once again discover questions which predate it.” In the Cabaret Voltaire, as Raoul Vaneigem would tell the story in The Revolution of Everyday Life, nothing, not the war, not the way you placed your beer glass on the table, stayed the same: “Everything was transformed.” That was the situation the Lettrist International set out to construct, but not in a cabaret; thus it began with living posters beating up people in the street. “The only modern phenomena comparable to Dada are the most savage outbreaks of juvenile delinquency,” Vaneigem said. He thought the role of the Situationist International was to apply “the violence of the delinquents on the plane of ideas.” The Lettrist International began by applying its ideas on the plane of delinquency. Running down the street in slogans, taking aim at the unconscious agents of the spectacle-commodity economy—it must have seemed like an idea at the time.
THE LI
The LI did have an idea: “. . . A New Idea in Europe,” it titled a manifesto on 3 August 1954, reaching back for the phrase Saint-Just coined as he reported to the Convention of the Revolution on 13 vêntose, Year II—3 March 1794. “Happiness is a new idea in Europe,” said Saint-Just; “Leisure,” said Michèle-I. Bernstein, André-Frank Conord, Mohamed Dahou, Guy-Ernest Debord, Jacques Fillon, Véra, and Gil J Wolman in the seventh number of the LI bulletin Potlatch, “is the real revolutionary question.”
In any case, economic prohibitions and their moral corollaries will soon be completely destroyed and superseded. The organization of leisure—the organization of the freedom of a multitude a little less driven to continuous work—is already a necessity for capitalist states just as it is for their marxist successors. Everywhere, one is limited to the obligatory degradation of stadiums or television programs.
It is above all for this reason that we must denounce the immoral condition imposed upon us: this state of poverty.
Having spent a few years doing nothing, in the common sense of the term, we can speak of our social attitude as avant-garde—because in a society still provisionally based in production, we have sought to devote ourselves seriously only to leisure.
If this question is not openly posed before the collapse of current economic development, chang
e will be no more than a bad joke. The new society which once again takes up the goals of the old society, without having recognized and imposed a new desire—that is the truly utopian tendency of socialism.
Only one task seems to us worth considering: the perfecting of a complete divertissement.
More than one to whom adventures happen, the adventurer is one who makes them happen.
The construction of situations will be the continuous realization of a great game, a game the players have chosen to play: a shifting of settings and conflicts to kill off the characters in a tragedy in twenty-four hours. But time to live will no longer be lacking.
Such a synthesis will have to bring together a critique of behavior, a compelling town planning, a mastery of ambiances and relationships. We know the first principles . . .
The LI’s theory of anti-economics was followed on the page by “The Best News of the Week,” a regular Potlatch feature:
Washington, D.C., July 29 (A.P.): In a speech delivered to a religious convention, Mr. Richard Nixon, the vice-president of the United States, declared that he believed those who imagined “a full bowl of rice” could prevent the people of Asia from turning toward communism were “gravely deluding themselves.”
“Economic well-being is important,” continued the vice-president, “but to claim that we can win the people of Asia to our side simply by raising their standard of living is a lie and a slander. This is a proud people, with a great record behind them.”
Thus did Richard Nixon add his voice to the growing Lettrist International chorus.
ARMED
Armed with its theory, the LI had a practice. Writing to Jean-Louis Brau in the spring of 1953, Wolman summed it up:
Where were we when you left? Joël has been out of jail for some time: parole. Freedom too for Jean-Michel and Fred (in for speeding—under the influence, of course). Little Eliane came out last week after a dramatic arrest in a maid’s room somewhere in Vincennes. She was with Joël and Jean-Michel (need I say they were drunk), who refused to open the door for the police, who called in reinforcements. In the confusion, they lost the LI seal. Linda not yet tried—Sarah still in jail, but her sister, sixteen-and-a-half, took her place. There have been more arrests, for drugs, for who knows what—it’s getting boring. Then there is G.-E., who spent ten days in a sanitarium where his parents sent him after he tried to asphyxiate himself. He’s back now. Serge will get out of jail May 12. The day before yesterday I threw up in Moineau’s. The latest amusement in the quarter is to spend the night in the catacombs (another one of Joël’s bright ideas) . . .
This, the members of the LI tried to convince themselves, was a rehearsal for the revolution they had promised each other to make: the supercession of art and the end of work, a shifting of settings and conflicts that would kill off the characters in a tragedy and bring real people to life—the first revolution, the LI told itself, consciously based not in a critique of suffering in the dominant society but in a “total critique of its idea of happiness,” a critique in acts, a new performance of everyday life. Happiness was still a new idea in Europe, one-hundred-and-sixty years after Saint-Just heard himself condemned as a traitor to the revolution—after he, voice of the New Man, stood silent as he was driven overnight from the Committee of Public Safety to the guillotine. Since then all official revolutions had rested their case not on happiness but on justice, and on that rock they had broken to pieces or turned to stone. But weren’t all true revolutionaries driven by the desire for happiness—as Ivan Chtcheglov said for the LI in his “Formula for a New Urbanism,” by a lust for a world in which it would be impossible not to fall in love? They had been embarrassed to admit it; those few instances in which they did admit it were expunged from the official record. What matters my happiness, against a multitude crying for food and clothing? It matters not, said the owners of the revolutionary tradition.
Jean-Michel Mension and Fred, 1953, by Ed van der Elsken
Taking up residence in “the catacombs of visible culture,” the LI stumbled on a notion that went back to the Free Spirit: “My happiness ought to justify existence itself.” So did the opposed first principles of justice and happiness turn into one; that, the LI thought, was what Saint-Just was talking about.
Born in 1767, executed in 1794, Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just was the prophet of the Republic of Virtue: of a virtue, dormant in every human heart, suppressed and twisted by the masters of the old world, which had to be drawn out of each new citizen—or enforced. Recognizing a new desire for happiness, for a moment Saint-Just had the power to impose it: the words with which he followed “a new idea in Europe” were “I propose to you the following decree.” He spoke on the stage of world history, one foot in Paris and the other in Sparta. He spoke to Lycurgus and Thucydides, to Lenin and Pol Pot, and he knew they would hear what he said. The LI spoke in a bar that sold franchise and solace along with beer and wine—“Cafe Megalomania,” the Berlin dadaists had called their version of the place. There the LI tried to recapture Saint-Just’s tone of voice, and it was hard to catch, austere and ecstatic, furious and still, the tone of the cryptic slogan: “The mind is a sophist who leads virtue to the scaffold.” You could puzzle that out for days, or you could look at Saint-Just’s face, at busts and engravings, but like the young man himself when his time was up, they said nothing. If one portrait was cold, all hard cheekbones and hooded eyes, the next was soft, the cheeks full and smooth, the eyes innocent. “To tell the truth, the only reason one fights is for what one loves,” said the philosopher of the Terror. “Fighting for everyone else is only the consequence.”
The LI, Eliane Brau wrote in 1968 (as Eliane Papai, she was the “Little Eliane” of Wolman’s letter), was “autoterrorist.” The group demanded that one practice terrorism on oneself—“a self-educational process,” Raoul Hausmann said of the psychology of the Berlin Dada Club, “in which routine and conventions have to be ruthlessly wiped out.” The LI worked hardest to maintain the conviction that nothing was more important, and so every person found unworthy of the game was excluded from it; Saint-Just, in whose ideal society banishment was to be the ultimate sanction, would have approved. Officially, the first to be removed were Isidore Isou, Gabriel Pomerand, and Maurice Lemaitre, who had never been present (claiming rights to the words “lettrist” and “lettrism” after the Chaplin incident, the LI incorporated the founders only to expel them as traitors to their own ideas)—and then, in the year between Wolman’s letter to Brau and “. . . A New Idea in Europe,” Brau himself (“militarist,” read the second number of Potlatch), Serge Berna (“lack of intellectual rigor”), the emblazoned Mension (“merely decorative”), and even the visionary Chtcheglov (“mythomania, delirium, lack of revolutionary consciousness”). “It’s pointless to hark back to the dead,” Wolman wrote to seal the LI’s first execution list. As in certain fundamentalist sects, those who remained within the group were never to speak to any who had been shut out, or even of them. But Debord did, in 1978, in his film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, matching a picture of Chtcheglov to a blind quotation from Julius Caesar. Debord read it on the soundtrack: “ ‘How many times, through the ages, will the sublime drama we are creating be performed in unknown tongues, before an audience which is yet to be!’ ”
The years had burdened the words with irony, but they still held real wonder; tracing the theme, Debord put a comic-strip panel on the screen. “THE KNIGHTS OF PRINCE VALIANT IN SEARCH OF ADVENTURES,” read the title: “HE ADVANCES NEAR THE MYSTERIOUS GLEAM WHICH LIGHTS UP THE PLACE WHERE NOTHING HUMAN HAS EVER BEEN FOUND.” Then Chtcheglov reappeared, and Debord spoke for himself: “It is said that merely by subjecting life and the city to his gaze, he changed them. In one year, he discovered the subjects of vengeance for a century.” That discovery was the LI’s drama, Debord was saying, and those subjects of vengeance its legacy.
It is this expressive contradiction—between nihilist acts so puerile as to cut themselves off from any philosophical ju
stification, and a voice so classically sentimental it could ennoble the most puerile act; between a found ancestry carrying seeds of totalitarianism and mass murder, and a will to a negation containing “no promise other than that of an autonomy without rules and without restraint” (Debord, In girum)—that defined the Lettrist International. In a conversation that moves from the Cabaret Voltaire to the Sex Pistols, the LI is a culmination of the first side of the story and a source of the second. More vitally, the LI frames the possibility that each actor might speak the language of every other.
In this story, the LI is ground-zero, a vessel both empty and full. The LI had a seal, which represented history—and which, before it was lost in a drunken moment, the group meant to apply to what philosophy it might derive from joy rides and nights spent in underground tombs. At the same time, the LI damned all those who believed in “leaving traces,” and it left few enough: in five years, less than three dozen skimpy newsletters, a clutch of fugitive essays, various renderings of détournement, some telephone-pole stickers, a slogan scratched on a wall. One can add a small pile of memoirs: Debord’s sandpaper-covered collage book, his films On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time (1959) and In girum, and Michèle Bernstein’s novels, Tous les chevaux du roi (All the King’s Horses, 1960) and La Nuit (1961)—queer memoirs, because while each cast back to the LI for subject or setting, none ever mentioned it.
In a way that is fitting, because it truly was a void the band had meant to conjure up. The LI’s unlikely project was to “do nothing” and yet maintain itself; thus its most tangible accomplishment was to persist from 1952 to 1957, when those few who were left (those who, as Bernstein put it in 1983, had somehow refrained from placing “their wine glasses on the table in a bourgeois manner”) joined with others, working artists older and far more notable than the lollard intellectuals of the LI, to form the Situationist International.